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And none of the editors of color who contribute to the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen are paid for their on video appearances while their white counterparts are. There is an editor at Bon Appetit who is paid $50,000 a year in New York City at Condé Nast. In the past week or two, we’ve started to see people talking about how toxic their workplaces are. Black people and people of color more broadly are underrepresented in every single industry. It affects absolutely every part of life. But if I’m being real about it, I think there’s a long way to go and I don’t think people have any sense of just how long that way is. You can’t just be wallowing in negativity or nothing ever will get accomplished. It just feels like a long term project, and I don’t want to be too negative. Roxane Gay: I don’t think this was going be something that we figure out in our lifetime or maybe my children’s lifetimes. I’ll be gone before this is ever resolved. I think what’s even more painful is just recognizing how much work we have to do, how much work this country has to do, what this world has to do and recognizing that we probably aren’t up to the task.īrad Listi: Is that where you stand, because I was going to ask you, how do you feel? I feel like when I look to my future, I’m like, I don’t think I’m going to. It was a good example of moving in the direction of justice, but never when it comes to white people being willing to really address the core issue and the core illness and problems that we have and that we have a lot of resistance to addressing because it’s uncomfortable and it’s painful.
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But one of the things that was highlighted in the essay is the fact that the language of the decision focused on the experience of how segregation in schools would affect Black children and did not mention once the issue of white supremacy. Board of Education, which desegregated schools and has had a lot of positive to that Supreme Court decision in terms of its effects on our society. Board of Education, just as an example of the ways in which white people can elude wanting to have the difficult conversations with each other and with themselves. I don’t know that a lot of Black people are surprised that we haven’t really addressed this because, again, this country has not really done enough to acknowledge the original sin and has not had a serious conversation about reparations. Like, I can’t believe that this is something that I’m just now discovering and that we haven’t addressed this decades ago. Roxane Gay: Yesterday, when there is all this hullabaloo about the army bases that were named after Confederate generals or whatever, I mean, I got to be honest with you, it doesn’t surprise me that this is the case … there’re many American military bases named after racist traitors. A contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, she is the author of several bestselling books, including Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger. Roxane Gay is this week’s special weekend guest.